WORDS David Michael

In KwaMashu, a township north of Durban, a distribution of stories claiming children were being kidnapped for the sale of their body parts led to violent protests. Foreign-owned shops were looted and torched. Roads were reportedly blocked and cars were stoned.

In fact, none of the stories that inspired this violence were true. The articles being circulated were fabricated. Major Thulane Zwane, a police spokesperson, condemned the protests, citing fake news specifically to blame as the source of the hysteria.

Fake news has led to previous acts of violence, including riots and looting. Photo: HeatherMG/flickr

‘We want to condemn these allegations because it is false,’ Zwane told the SABC. ‘We have never received any report that one family member was kidnapped and was not found or someone died as a result of these kidnapping. But we also want to tell communities not to post and repost all this fake news [on social media] they must first confirm the fake news [with the police].’

This is not the first time violence, protests and hysteria have occurred in result of the spread of fake news. In the United States, a man travelled to the nation’s capital and began firing an assault rifle inside a neighbourhood pizza restaurant. Edgar Maddison Welch had believed an internet conspiracy theory that children were being harboured as sex slaves at the restaurant.

Fake news is false information or propaganda published under the guise of being authentic news. Articles of this agenda do not contain provable facts. Fake news can have a myriad of motives as Jean-Phillipe Wade, a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal explained. ‘There are many types of fake news: ideologically-driven individuals and organisations for whom facts get in the way of their extreme beliefs; government-driven information where facts get in the way of propaganda and persuasion; ordinary people circulating false stories which often they believe to be true due to their being media-unsophisticated; and so on.’

The spreading of fake news can be damaging, as seen in the protests in KwaMashu. Much of the blame falls on social media sites such as Facebook.

Influence of social media

Emma Sadleir, a social media lawyer, often deals with the issue of holding social media platforms responsible for content. In regards to fake news, she said it’s an ongoing question.

‘Is Facebook an editorial company, or are they just a notice board provider?’ Sadleir said. ‘The problem is we find it very difficult to hold companies like Facebook, like Twitter, like Alphabet responsible for any content in South Africa. They simply take the approach that they don’t have jurisdiction here.’

However, Facebook is putting in some effort to counteract fake news. It currently allows users to report posts found on their timeline as false. The article is then turned over to independent fact-checking groups such as PolitiFact, ABC News, the Associated Press, and Snopes. When two or more fact-checkers debunk an article, it is supposed to get a ‘disputed’ tag that warns users before they share the piece and is attached to the article in news feeds.

The label has its downsides though, as it often comes after the story has already gone viral.

Facebook users now have the option to report items from their newsfeed as ‘fake news’. Photo: Screenshot from Facebook profile

‘News travels incredibly fast on the Internet, rapidly turning into a viral storm, which disappears as quickly,’ Wade said. ‘So much of this information is unprocessed rumours, and the important thing is that one should automatically not trust this information, but instead go onto more trustworthy media sites to check the accuracy.’

In some cases, the label actually causes the number of shares to spike. Christian Winthrop published a story falsely claiming that a number of Irish people had been brought to the US as slaves. He told the Guardian despite the fact that Facebook labelled it as false, the number of shares actually grew.

‘A bunch of conservative groups grabbed this and said, “Hey, they are trying to silence this blog – share, share share,’” Winthrop told the Guardian. ‘With Facebook trying to throttle it and say, “Don’t share it,” it actually had the opposite effect.’

Question of free speech

An additional inability to prevent the spread of false stories has been attributed to the articles being an expression of free speech.

‘It’s a tricky area because if you start regulating fake news and you start banning lies and misinformation, you’re very much jeopardising the free speech we all enjoy and rely on,’ Gabriel Kahn, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, told San Francisco Chronicle. ‘You essentially have two unequal things that rely on the same freedoms, and if you take it away from one, it will impact the other.’

Dr Glenda Daniels, a senior lecturer in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, disagrees. ‘Fake news is spreading lies and falsities,’ Daniels said. ‘It’s not the same as freedom of speech.’

While Section 16 of the Constitution gives everybody the right to freedom of expression, it doesn’t protect statements that provoke war propaganda, promote violence or advocate hate against a specific race, ethnicity, gender or religion. The debate still remains complex and the biased nature of modern-day media only adds to the murkiness of the argument.

‘The news is always slanted in some direction, and there is no such thing as “objective” news, because the world is made up of differences, and democracy is all about respecting those multiplicity of views,’ Wade said. ‘So, all news is biased. That, no legislation can get rid of entirely. What we are concerned about with fake news is inventing reality, of not having an interest in… confining one’s story to what really happened in the real world.’

Government intervention

In some countries, the government has stepped in to proactively minimise the spreading of fake news. Germany’s Cabinet has approved a bill that fines social networking sites up to up to 50 million euros (R700 million) for failure to ‘swiftly remove illegal content such as hate speech or defamatory fake news.’

Legislation has not been passed by the South African government to prevent the spread of fake news, making it difficult to prosecute any direct sources for the creation and distribution of false stories.

‘I don’t think you can legislate against it because it all happens on social media and it’s not the traditional kind of publications that are causing fake news to spread,’ Sadleir said. ‘It’s just everyday users on social media.’

‘I don’t think you can legislate against it because it all happens on social media and it’s not the traditional kind of publications that are causing fake news to spread,’ Sadleir said. ‘It’s just everyday users on social media.’

Sadleir does believe, however, there are other measures that can be taken by the government in order to combat fake news.

‘There’s very little government support in terms of curing the desperate ignorance around what it means to live in a digital age; to be a publisher to have this instant access to an international public platform,’ Sadleir said. ‘Rather than try to censor, try to combat it by introducing people to be more interrogative of the facts to make them sure that they’re fact checking before they’re sharing content.’

Wade believes one of the first steps could come from the school systems.

As an internet user, you become responsible for what you share, with just the click of a button. Photo: Animated Heaven/flickr

‘It is absolutely vital that schools now teach a critical media literacy to children,’ Wade said. ‘In the long run, this is the only way to prevent ordinary people from being manipulated by unscrupulous “news-writers”.’

Public responsibility

Despite what social media companies and the government are doing, the public has a lot of power to stop the spread of fake news. The influence of fake news is generated by everyday people sharing the content with others.

‘Appreciate that in South Africa you are responsible for everything you share, and everything you post,’ Sadleir said. ‘If you’re going to put your name on it, if you’re going to be endorsing it you better make sure that it’s true.’

When assessing whether or not an article is false, consider the source for credibility. Double-check the logo. Sometimes the fake news site can have a logo that’s slightly different from the original. The simplest way is to do a small bit of research yourself and Google it.

‘Think before you retweet or share,’ Daniels said. ‘Especially if something is sensational and you’re hoping to get more followers, the likelihood of it being lies is also strong.’

David completed his Bachelors in Journalism and stepped right onto the plane to intern at Cape Chameleon in Cape Town. He enjoys exploring and experiencing other cultures. David hopes to turn his taste for travel into a career as a foreign correspondent. The American also apologises for any mistakes when writing in British-English. It can be counfuzing.